What We Talk About When We Talk About Race

Fact: New Haven is a racially divided city. White and Asian-American families in the city statistically have been able to pass wealth to members hurt by the recession, while black and Hispanic families have not … because they don’t have as much wealth to pass.

Up for debate: Whether New Haveners are willing to engage in a genuine conversation about it.

Salwa Abdussabur (pictured below) is up for it. She is soaking up facts about New Haven’s racial disparity and sharing them as widely as she can. She bought that information to the WNHH studios, where she joined her father, Shafiq Abdussabur, for another episode of ​“Urban Talk Radio.”

It’s something she’s been thinking about a great deal for the past three weeks, since attending the Elm Shakespeare Company​‘s performance of Twelfth Night in Edgerton Park earlier this summer. A 17-year-old from Beaver Hills, she had never seen the large, single-family houses and manicured apartment buildings that line Whitney Avenue in the East Rock neighborhood, just blocks away from one of the poorest, most crime-ridden neighborhood pockets in the city. It was a wake-up call, she said, to look a little harder at the city’s lopsided distribution of wealth, and its correlation to race.

“I have never, ever been to this park before,” she shared. ​“In this particular area of New Haven, it’s clean. There’s not even a dust speck on the street. Just looking at this section of New Haven and thinking about where I live, not even a block away there is ​‘ghettos’ … it just baffles me that there is this this really nice block of New Haven, but only a block away there’s all these cluttered houses, dirt, like … awful situations.”

She isn’t the only one thinking about it. ​“New Haven is great and I love it. But we have challenges that we have to really confront, and one of those things … is that segregation in the city that we have to bridge. You have sections that are literally next door to each other. We need to bridge that dividing line,” urged Mubarakah Ibrahim, host of WNHH radio’s ​“Mornings with Mubarakah” and a special guest on ​“Urban Talk Radio.”

“To a lot of people money is pain. Money is an issue,” she added.

Behind her statement are not only statistics — like the fact that the poorest Americans are also the sickest — but situations from her own life. When she lost extended family members recently, they had to be cremated because insurance money for burial had run out.

“You’ve grown up on the American dream,” said Shafiq to Slawa. ​“But let me tell you, as your parent, it’s a nightmare to keep it alive.”

To listen to the episode, click on the audio above or find it in iTunes or any podcatcher under ​“WNHH Community Radio.”